This Saturday I would have liked to have rolled out of bed, brewed some coffee, fried some eggs and tuned the TV to the Red River Rivalry. Without cable TV or an effective set of rabbit ears, however, I had to make other plans.
I ended up watching the game in the law school building’s first-floor lounge area, but this experience and others over the past few weeks have made me wonder: Without a pipeline through which the likes of Jon Stewart, Tim Gunn and the Longhorn football team can sneak into my house, am I missing something important?
I realize that not having television is not unusual. Many people I know grew up in a family where “Seinfeld” was not a regular Thursday-night activity.
However, for the last two years I lived in the rural western end of the Rio Grande Valley, I was one of the few people among my group of friends who had a satellite dish. I agreed to pay DIRECTV’s exorbitant fees to feel connected to the rest of the world by watching NFL football, “The Office” and college basketball.
I occasionally referenced things I had seen on TV that my dish-less friends were unaware of — the two old people sitting outdoors in separate bathtubs at the end of the Cialis commercial, for example. I found that referencing and ridiculing commercials no one else had seen does not make for great conversation.
Now I find myself at the other end of that divide. My Austin friends reference bad TV of which I’m totally unaware. I consider commercials to be the lowest form of communication, yet I occasionally feel I’m missing out on something culturally significant.
But am I? Cable and over-the-air television are less vital to feeling culturally connected than they once were. I listen to free podcasts of “Pardon the Interruption.” I watch “The Office” and “The Daily Show” on the Internet, for free. I watch reruns of “The Simpsons” on DVD instead of network television. I pay $2 — well worth it — to download the newest episode of “Mad Men” the day after it airs. I listen to NFL games via Internet radio.
What I don’t do anymore is sit down and watch TV just for the sake of watching TV. I no longer find myself flipping idly through channels, searching for something worth watching and settling on the least unappealing in a slew of crappy shows because it’s an easy way to turn off my brain for a while.
A friend of mine has an impressive cable package that includes three digits worth of channels and a digital recording system. One night, we somehow ended up watching a recorded episode of “Hole in the Wall,” which featured a team of three little people competing against a group of female bodybuilders to see who could most gracefully propel herself through the show’s eponymous orifice.
In fictional depictions of the future such as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or the 2006 movie, “Idiocracy,” the intellectual regression of a society is often depicted through the media they consume. In “Brave New World” citizens clamor for “feelies” — interactive pornography that Huxley, writing in the early 1930s, saw as the logical extension of “talkies.” In “Idiocracy,” the No. 1 television show in the year 2505 is “Ow! My Balls!”
As I watched a blindfolded little person get knocked into a pool of water by a moving Styrofoam wall, it occurred to me that if someone wanted to make a case for America’s intellectual depravity, all he would have to do is film a room of people watching “Hole in the Wall.” Occasionally, the wall even hits people in the groin — “Ow, my balls!”
Currently, there are amazing things being done with television — “Mad Men” and the recently concluded “The Wire” are the best examples — but the medium also stoops more and more regularly to the lowest common denominator.
While I may occasionally miss being able to share a laugh about what those two old people in the bathtubs plan on doing once the Cialis kicks in, I don’t miss stumbling across something like “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” — my personal choice for mind-numbing entertainment when I lived in the Valley — and watching it only because it’s an easy thing to do and I might see someone get hit in the balls.
Even though that is hilarious.
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